A large amount of the population in Japan's biggest cities have a destructive relationship with work, literally, with many grinding themselves away to an early grave. The social phenomenon has its own word, karoshi, and it isn't death from digit-crippling labor in a sweatshop or accidents on a building site.

Earlier this year, the suicide of 26-year-old Mina Mori was accepted as karoshi after an investigation found she'd been clocking up 140 hours of overtime every month, working at a popular chain restaurant called Watami. Employees for numerous companies are expected to embrace a work culture that's destroying their lives-a kind of worse version of the embrace through gritted-teeth I'd imagine David Miliband gave his brother when he got the party leader job-but a firm, necessary embrace nonetheless.

Karoshi was first recognized in the late 60s, when a guy in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company died after having a stroke, which seemed kind of unusual for a 29-year-old, until people realized that radically overworking a human can have negative effects on the body, which somehow managed to be a surprise. Since then, cases have become relentless battles between family members of the deceased trying to prove their relatives died from being overworked, and the company in question trying their hardest to sweep it under the ever-lumpier rug.